The U.K. KARENWAFFEN Caroline Dinenage And Mark Lancaster

thegrayzone  |   Caroline Dinenage served as the UK government’s Digital and Culture minister from February 2020 to September 2021, making her de facto chief of the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS). 

In this capacity, she was personally responsible for overseeing construction of the repressive, World Economic Forum-endorsed Online Safety Bill, which has been criticized by rights groups for threatening the rights to free expression, and privacy. For her leading role in crafting the speech-muzzling bill, Dinenage was honored by Princess Royal with the title of Dame Commander of the British Empire.

Moreover, during this period, the DCMS was home to the shadowy, intelligence official-run Counter-Disinformation Unit (CDU), which policed “COVID-19 disinformation narratives” online.

Investigations by the civil liberties organization Big Brother Watch have revealed that instead of suppressing content that posed risks to public health, the CDU was preoccupied with censoring and deplatforming reasonable online criticisms of the British government’s Covid-19 response, including opposition to lockdowns and vaccine passports. 

According to an official fact sheet, the CDU’s focus turned to the Ukraine proxy war in 2022, and particularly to targeting content suggesting “the Bucha massacre and the bombing of the maternity hospital in Mariupol, Ukraine, were both hoaxes.”

Dinenage’s husband is Mark Lancaster, a fellow information warrior dedicated to advancing the propaganda goals of the British government. Lancaster reportedly left his wife and four-month-old daughter in 2013 when he began dating Dinenage, who was herself married at the time to a British Naval officer.

A former Conservative MP and Armed Forces minister, Lancaster helped lead London’s blitz on pandemic dissent as deputy commander of the British Army’s 77th Brigade between June 2018 and July 2022.

Specialized in “behaviour and attitudinal change,” the 77th Brigade maintains a vast militia of real, fake, and automated social media accounts to disseminate and amplify pro-state messaging, and discredit domestic and foreign enemies.

During the pandemic, the 77th Brigade targeted people within Britain and across the West with advanced psychological manipulation strategies honed on battlefields against enemy militaries. The online profile of a 77th Brigade veteran notes they were deployed straight from a tour of the Middle East – where they “successfully implemented behavioral change strategies against ISIS” – to “countering dis- and misinformation during the Covid-19 crisis.”

However, in January, an ex-Brigade whistleblower revealed how the Ministry of Defence and RRU routinely circumvented British law to advance the government’s crusade against pandemic dissent:

“To skirt the legal difficulties of a military unit monitoring domestic dissent, the view was that unless a profile explicitly stated their real name and nationality, they could be a foreign agent and were fair game. But it is quite obvious that our activities resulted in the monitoring of the UK population…These posts did not contain information that was untrue or coordinated [emphasis added].”

As The Grayzone revealed in June 2023, British journalist Paul Mason had attempted to submit a “formal complaint” about The Grayzone to DCMS, believing it would trigger a government investigation into this outlet’s “funding and activities,” and ultimately its deplatforming. Mason’s handler, a British intelligence agent named Andy Pryce, boasted in leaked emails of his personal role in YouTube’s banning of “Russian stuff” in Britain. The CDU has been confirmed as the government body responsible for these censorship demands.

Now, this shadowy, intelligence-linked entity appears to be the spearhead of the campaign to silence Russell Brand.

A Vast And Long-Lived Hoax Has Been Perpetrated Against America's Citizenry

theguardian  |  Hidden among the avalanche of documents leaked by Edward Snowden were images from a Powerpoint presentation by GCHQ, entitled The Art of Deception: Training for a New Generation of Online Covert Operations. Images include camouflaged moths, inflatable tanks, women in burqas, and complex diagrams plastered with jargon, buzzwords and slogans: "Disruption Operational Playbook", "Swap the real for the false and vice versa", "People make decisions as part of groups" and, beneath a shot of hands shuffling a deck of cards, "We want to build Cyber Magicians". Curiously, sandwiched in the middle of the document are three photographs of UFOs. Not real ones – classic fakes: one was a hub cap, another a bunch of balloons, and one that turned out to be a seagull.

Devout ufologists might seize upon this as further proof that our governments "know something" about aliens and their transportation methods, but really it suggests the opposite: the UFO community is a textbook case of a gullible group susceptible to manipulation. Having spent too long watching the skies and The X-Files, it's implied, they'll readily swallow whatever snippet of "evidence" suits their grand theory.

If there really is a UFO conspiracy, it's surely the worst-kept secret in history. Roswell, Area 51, flashing lights, little green men, abductions – it's all been fed through the pop culture mill to the point of fatigue. Even the supposed enforcers of the secret, the "men in black", have their own movie franchise. But a new documentary, Mirage Men, unearths compelling evidence that UFO folklore was actually fabricated by the US government. Rather than covering up the existence of aliens, could it be that the real conspiracy has been persuading us to believe in them?

Mirage Men's chief coup is to land an actual man in black: a former Air Force special investigations officer named Richard Doty, who admits to having infiltrated UFO circles. A fellow UFO researcher says: "Doty had this wonderful way to sell it – 'I'm with the government. You cooperate with us and I'm going to tell you what the government really knows about UFOs, deep down in those vaults.'" Doty and his colleagues fed credulous ufologists lies and half-truths, knowing their fertile imaginations would do the rest. In return, they were apprised of chatter from the community, thus alerting the military when anyone was getting to close to their top-secret technology. And if the Soviets thought the US really was communing with aliens, all the better.

The classic case, well-known to conspiracy aficionados, is Paul Bennewitz, a successful electronics entrepreneur in New Mexico. In 1979, Bennewitz started seeing strange lights in the sky, and picking up weird transmissions on his amateur equipment. The fact that he lived just across the road from Kirtland air force base should have set alarm bells ringing, but Bennewitz was convinced these phenomena were of extraterrestrial origin. Being a good patriot, he contacted the Air Force, who realised that, far from eavesdropping on ET, Bennewitz was inadvertently eavesdropping on them. Instead of making him stop, though, Doty and other officers told Bennewitz they were interested in his findings. That encouraged Bennewitz to dig deeper. Within a few years, he was interpreting alien languages, spotting crashed alien craft in the hills from his plane (he was an amateur pilot), and sounding the alert for a full-scale invasion. All the time, the investigators were surveilling him surveilling them. They gave Bennewitz computer software that "interpreted" the signals, and even dumped fake props for him to discover. The mania took over Bennewitz's life. In 1988, his family checked him into a psychiatric facility.

There's plenty more like this. As Mirage Men discovers, central tenets of the UFO belief system turn out to have far earthlier origins. Mysterious cattle mutilations in 1970s New Mexico turn out to have been officials furtively investigating radiation in livestock after they'd conducted an ill-advised experiment in underground "nuclear fracking". Test pilots for the military's experimental silent helicopters admit to attaching flashing lights to their craft to fool civilians. Doty himself comes across as a slippery character, to say the least. "He remains an absolute enigma," says Mark Pilkington, writer of the book Mirage Men, the basis for the documentary. He found the retired Doty working as a traffic cop in a small New Mexico town. "Some of what he said was true and I'm sure a lot of it wasn't, or was a version of the truth. I have no doubt Rick was at the bottom of a ladder that stretches all the way to Washington. It's unclear to what extent he was following orders and to what taking matters into his own hands."

Doty almost admits to having had a hand in supposedly leaked "classified" documents, such as the "Majestic 12" dossier – spilling the beans on a secret alien liaison committee founded by President Truman. But he denies involvement in the "Project Serpo" papers – which claimed that 12 American military personnel paid a secret visit to an alien planet in the Zeta Reticuli system – only to be caught out as the source of the presumed hoax. The Serpo scenario, it has been noted, is not unlike the plot of Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters Of The Third Kind. Does that suggest that the forgers lazily copied the movie? Or that the movie is based on real events and Spielberg was in on the conspiracy?

 

With A Twinkle In His Eye Lt. Col Robert J. Friend Acknowledged The Truth

HuffPost  | A retired Air Force official in charge of one of its most famous UFO research efforts said before his death last year that the effort may have been scuttled not because it was fruitless, but just the opposite.

In a clip from the new documentary “The Phenomenon,” Lt. Col. Robert Friend pointed to the sudden closure of Project Blue Book in 1969. 

“Which would suggest what?” he asked before answering his own question: “That they knew what it was.”

James Fox, the film’s director added: “Or didn’t know what it was.”

But Friend, who led Project Blue Book from 1958-1963, persisted.

“Also the other way,” Friend replied with a telling grin. “That they did know what it was.”

Officially, the project was shuttered despite some 700 open cases because it “no longer can be justified either on the ground of national security or in the interest of science.”

But Friend, who died last year at the age of 99, suggested in his last interview that the shutdown could have been for another reason:

Friend, who was one of the Tuskegee Airmen during WWII and the only Black leader of Project Blue Book, heading it during the civil rights movement, was originally skeptical of claims that aliens had ever made the long trip to Earth.

“Do I believe that we have been visited? No, I don’t believe that,” he told HuffPost in 2012. “And the reason I don’t believe it is because I can’t conceive of any of the ways in which we could overcome some of these things: How much food would you have to take with you on a trip for 22 years through space? How much fuel would you need? How much oxygen or other things to sustain life do you have to have?”

However, Friend also called for more study and said he believes there could be life elsewhere.

“I think that anytime there’s a possibility of scientific pay dirt from studying these phenomena, that yes, it would be much better if the government or some other agency was to take on these things and to pursue the scientific aspects of it,” he said.

More recent revelations indicate that the U.S. government’s interest in UFOs didn’t end with Project Blue Book but have continued in other forms, much of which is detailed in “The Phenomenon.”

Former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said in the film that the federal government has been covering up UFOs and that most of the evidence “hasn’t seen the light of day.”

 

The CIA's Role In Shaping The UFO Narrative

FAS  |  An extraordinary 95 percent of all Americans have at least heard or read something about Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs), and 57 percent believe they are real. (1) Former US Presidents Carter and Reagan claim to have seen a UFO. UFOlogists--a neologism for UFO buffs--and private UFO organizations are found throughout the United States. Many are convinced that the US Government, and particularly CIA, are engaged in a massive conspiracy and coverup of the issue. The idea that CIA has secretly concealed its research into UFOs has been a major theme of UFO buffs since the modern UFO phenomena emerged in the late 1940s. (2)

In late 1993, after being pressured by UFOlogists for the release of additional CIA information on UFOs, (3) DCI R. James Woolsey ordered another review of all Agency files on UFOs. Using CIA records compiled from that review, this study traces CIA interest and involvement in the UFO controversy from the late 1940s to 1990. It chronologically examines the Agency's efforts to solve the mystery of UFOs, its programs that had an impact on UFO sightings, and its attempts to conceal CIA involvement in the entire UFO issue. What emerges from this examination is that, while Agency concern over UFOs was substantial until the early 1950s, CIA has since paid only limited and peripheral attention to the phenomena.

Background

The emergence in 1947 of the Cold War confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union also saw the first wave of UFO sightings. The first report of a "flying saucer" over the United States came on 24 June 1947, when Kenneth Arnold, a private pilot and reputable businessman, while looking for a downed plane sighted nine disk-shaped objects near Mt. Rainier, Washington, traveling at an estimated speed of over 1,000 mph. Arnold's report was followed by a flood of additional sightings, including reports from military and civilian pilots and air traffic controllers all over the United States. (4) In 1948, Air Force Gen. Nathan Twining, head of the Air Technical Service Command, established Project SIGN (initially named Project SAUCER) to collect, collate, evaluate, and distribute within the government all information relating to such sightings, on the premise that UFOs might be real and of national security concern. (5)

The Technical Intelligence Division of the Air Material Command (AMC) at Wright Field (later Wright-Patterson Air Force Base) in Dayton, Ohio, assumed control of Project SIGN and began its work on 23 January 1948. Although at first fearful that the objects might be Soviet secret weapons, the Air Force soon concluded that UFOs were real but easily explained and not extraordinary. The Air Force report found that almost all sightings stemmed from one or more of three causes: mass hysteria and hallucination, hoax, or misinterpretation of known objects. Nevertheless, the report recommended continued military intelligence control over the investigation of all sightings and did not rule out the possibility of extraterrestrial phenomena. (6)

Amid mounting UFO sightings, the Air Force continued to collect and evaluate UFO data in the late 1940s under a new project, GRUDGE, which tried to alleviate public anxiety over UFOs via a public relations campaign designed to persuade the public that UFOs constituted nothing unusual or extraordinary. UFO sightings were explained as balloons, conventional aircraft, planets, meteors, optical illusions, solar reflections, or even "large hailstones." GRUDGE officials found no evidence in UFO sightings of advanced foreign weapons design or development, and they concluded that UFOs did not threaten US security. They recommended that the project be reduced in scope because the very existence of Air Force official interest encouraged people to believe in UFOs and contributed to a "war hysteria" atmosphere. On 27 December 1949, the Air Force announced the project's termination. (7)

With increased Cold War tensions, the Korean war, and continued UFO sightings, USAF Director of Intelligence Maj. Gen. Charles P. Cabell ordered a new UFO project in 1952. Project BLUE BOOK became the major Air Force effort to study the UFO phenomenon throughout the 1950s and 1960s. (8) The task of identifying and explaining UFOs continued to fall on the Air Material Command at Wright-Patterson. With a small staff, the Air Technical Intelligence Center (ATIC) tried to persuade the public that UFOs were not extraordinary. (9) Projects SIGN, GRUDGE, and BLUE BOOK set the tone for the official US Government position regarding UFOs for the next 30 years.

Early CIA Concerns, 1947-52

CIA closely monitored the Air Force effort, aware of the mounting number of sightings and increasingly concerned that UFOs might pose a potential security threat. (10) Given the distribution of the sightings, CIA officials in 1952 questioned whether they might reflect "midsummer madness.'' (11) Agency officials accepted the Air Force's conclusions about UFO reports, although they concluded that "since there is a remote possibility that they may be interplanetary aircraft, it is necessary to investigate each sighting." (12)

A massive buildup of sightings over the United States in 1952, especially in July, alarmed the Truman administration. On 19 and 20 July, radar scopes at Washington National Airport and Andrews Air Force Base tracked mysterious blips. On 27 July, the blips reappeared. The Air Force scrambled interceptor aircraft to investigate, but they found nothing. The incidents, however, caused headlines across the country. The White House wanted to know what was happening, and the Air Force quickly offered the explanation that the radar blips might be the result of "temperature inversions." Later, a Civil Aeronautics Administration investigation confirmed that such radar blips were quite common and were caused by temperature inversions. (13)

Although it had monitored UFO reports for at least three years, CIA reacted to the new rash of sightings by forming a special study group within the Office of Scientific Intelligence (OSI) and the Office of Current Intelligence (OCI) to review the situation. (14) Edward Tauss, acting chief of OSI's Weapons and Equipment Division, reported for the group that most UFO sightings could be easily explained. Nevertheless, he recommended that the Agency continue monitoring the problem, in coordination with ATIC. He also urged that CIA conceal its interest from the media and the public, "in view of their probable alarmist tendencies" to accept such interest as confirming the existence of UFOs. (15)

Upon receiving the report, Deputy Director for Intelligence (DDI) Robert Amory, Jr. assigned responsibility for the UFO investigations to OSI's Physics and Electronics Division, with A. Ray Gordon as the officer in charge. (16) Each branch in the division was to contribute to the investigation, and Gordon was to coordinate closely with ATIC. Amory, who asked the group to focus on the national security implications of UFOs, was relaying DCI Walter Bedell Smith's concerns. (17) Smith wanted to know whether or not the Air Force investigation of flying saucers was sufficiently objective and how much more money and manpower would be necessary to determine the cause of the small percentage of unexplained flying saucers. Smith believed "there was only one chance in 10,000 that the phenomenon posed a threat to the security of the country, but even that chance could not be taken." According to Smith, it was CIA's responsibility by statute to coordinate the intelligence effort required to solve the problem. Smith also wanted to know what use could be made of the UFO phenomenon in connection with US psychological warfare efforts. (18)

Led by Gordon, the CIA Study Group met with Air Force officials at Wright-Patterson and reviewed their data and findings. The Air Force claimed that 90 percent of the reported sightings were easily accounted for. The other 10 percent were characterized as "a number of incredible reports from credible observers." The Air Force rejected the theories that the sightings involved US or Soviet secret weapons development or that they involved "men from Mars"; there was no evidence to support these concepts. The Air Force briefers sought to explain these UFO reports as the misinterpretation of known objects or little understood natural phenomena. (19) Air Force and CIA officials agreed that outside knowledge of Agency interest in UFOs would make the problem more serious. (20) This concealment of CIA interest contributed greatly to later charges of a CIA conspiracy and coverup.

Amateur photographs of alleged UFOs

Passoria, New Jersey, 31 July 1952

Sheffield, England, 4 March 1962
& Minneapolis, Minnesota, 20 October 1960

The CIA Study Group also searched the Soviet press for UFO reports, but found none, causing the group to conclude that the absence of reports had to have been the result of deliberate Soviet Government policy. The group also envisioned the USSR's possible use of UFOs as a psychological warfare tool. In addition, they worried that, if the US air warning system should be deliberately overloaded by UFO sightings, the Soviets might gain a surprise advantage in any nuclear attack. (21)

Because of the tense Cold War situation and increased Soviet capabilities, the CIA Study Group saw serious national security concerns in the flying saucer situation. The group believed that the Soviets could use UFO reports to touch off mass hysteria and panic in the United States. The group also believed that the Soviets might use UFO sightings to overload the US air warning system so that it could not distinguish real targets from phantom UFOs. H. Marshall Chadwell, Assistant Director of OSI, added that he considered the problem of such importance "that it should be brought to the attention of the National Security Council, in order that a communitywide coordinated effort towards it solution may be initiated." (22)

Chadwell briefed DCI Smith on the subject of UFOs in December 1952. He urged action because he was convinced that "something was going on that must have immediate attention" and that "sightings of unexplained objects at great altitudes and traveling at high speeds in the vicinity of major US defense installations are of such nature that they are not attributable to natural phenomena or known types of aerial vehicles." He drafted a memorandum from the DCI to the National Security Council (NSC) and a proposed NSC Directive establishing the investigation of UFOs as a priority project throughout the intelligence and the defense research and development community. (23) Chadwell also urged Smith to establish an external research project of top-level scientists to study the problem of UFOs. (24) After this briefing, Smith directed DDI Amory to prepare a NSC Intelligence Directive (NSCID) for submission to the NSC on the need to continue the investigation of UFOs and to coordinate such investigations with the Air Force. (25)

It Aint As Gucci As People Think...,

NYTimes  |  In the Air Force, Airman Teixeira became a low-level computer tech at Otis Air National Guard Base in Sandwich, Mass., where his mother said he worked nights, helping maintain secure networks. There, he had broad access to a secure facility where he could access a global network of classified material from the military and 17 other American intelligence agencies.

Authorities say that Mr. Teixeira eventually leaked dozens of documents containing potentially harmful details about the war in Ukraine and other sensitive national security topics. 

That a 21-year-old with so little authority could have access to a such a vast trove of top secret information might surprise the general public, but people who have worked in the intelligence world say untold thousands of troops and government civilians have access to top secret materials, including many young, inexperienced workers the military relies on to process the monumental amount of intelligence it collects.

Those workers can log onto the Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System — essentially a highly classified version of Google — and in milliseconds pull up briefings on Ukraine, China or nearly any other sensitive subject that the U.S. government collects intelligence on.

Though his motivations may be different, Mr. Teixeira is remarkably similar to two other high-profile leakers in recent years, Chelsea Manning and Reality Winner, said Javed Ali, a former senior U.S. counterterrorism official who held intelligence roles at the F.B.I., the Defense Intelligence Agency and the Department of Homeland Security.

Ms. Manning was a 23-year-old Army intelligence analyst who was convicted in 2013 of giving more than 700,000 classified documents to WikiLeaks. Ms. Winner was a 26-year-old former Air Force linguist working as a military contractor who in 2017 printed out a classified report on Russian hacking, hid it in her pantyhose, and gave it to The Intercept.

Unlike Ms. Manning and Ms. Winner, who came to be seen as whistle-blowers motivated by ideology, Airman Teixeira did not appear to be driven by government policies, according to people who knew him online.

But all three were relatively young and had security clearances that were the classified intelligence equivalent of having the keys to dad’s red convertible.

“Clearly their relatively young age is a common factor, and I would hope the intelligence community is thinking about that,” said Bennett Miller, a retired Air Force intelligence analyst. “The problem is that the community needs these people. It can’t work without them.”

The words “top secret” may conjure images of pristine vaults and retinal scanners, Mr. Miller said, but in reality, while some highly classified material is siloed in special access programs, most of the rest is accessible to thousands of ordinary people who have security clearances. And security can be surprisingly lax.

Often, these systems are basically just a bunch of computers on a desk and there is “nothing really stopping anyone from printing something and carrying it out,” Mr. Miller said, adding, “It ain’t as Gucci as people think.”

Unaccountable Algorithmic Tyranny

alt-market |  In this article I want to stress the issue of AI governance and how it might be made to appeal to the masses. In order to achieve the dystopian future the globalists want, they still have to convince a large percentage of the population to applaud it and embrace it.

The comfort of having a system that makes difficult decisions for us is an obvious factor, as mentioned above. But, AI governance is not just about removing choice, it’s also about removing the information we might need to be educated enough to make choices. We saw this recently with the covid pandemic restrictions and the collusion between governments, corporate media and social media. Algorithms were widely used by web media conglomerates from Facebook to YouTube to disrupt the flow of information that might run contrary to the official narrative.

In some cases the censorship targeted people merely asking pertinent questions or fielding alternative theories. In other cases, the censorship outright targeted provably factual data that was contrary to government policies. A multitude of government claims on covid origins, masking, lockdowns and vaccines have been proven false over the past few years, and yet millions of people still blindly believe the original narrative because they were bombarded with it nonstop by the algorithms. They were never exposed to the conflicting information, so they were never able to come to their own conclusions.

Luckily, unlike bots, human intelligence is filled with anomalies – People who act on intuition and skepticism in order to question preconceived or fabricated assertions. The lack of contrary information immediately causes suspicion for many, and this is what authoritarian governments often refuse to grasp.

The great promise globalists hold up in the name of AI is the idea of a purely objective state; a social and governmental system without biases and without emotional content. It’s the notion that society can be run by machine thinking in order to “save human beings from themselves” and their own frailties. It is a false promise, because there will never be such a thing as objective AI, nor any AI that understand the complexities of human psychological development.

Furthermore, the globalist dream of AI is driven not by adventure, but by fear. It’s about the fear of responsibility, the fear of merit, the fear of inferiority, the fear of struggle and the fear of freedom. The greatest accomplishments of mankind are admirable because they are achieved with emotional content, not in spite of it. It is that content that inspires us to delve into the unknown and overcome our fears. AI governance and an AI integrated society would be nothing more than a desperate action to deny the necessity of struggle and the will to overcome.

Globalists are more than happy to offer a way out of the struggle, and they will do it with AI as the face of their benevolence. All you will have to do is trade your freedoms and perhaps your soul in exchange for never having to face the sheer terror of your own quiet thoughts. Some people, sadly, believe this is a fair trade.

The elites will present AI as the great adjudicator, the pure and logical intercessor of the correct path; not just for nations and for populations at large but for each individual life. With the algorithm falsely accepted as infallible and purely unbiased, the elites can then rule the world through their faceless creation without any oversight – For they can then claim that it’s not them making decisions, it’s the AI.  How does one question or even punish an AI for being wrong, or causing disaster? And, if the AI happens to make all its decisions in favor of the globalist agenda, well, that will be treated as merely coincidental.

Disingenuously Shaping The Narrative Around Large Language Model Computing

vice  |  More than 30,000 people—including Tesla’s Elon Musk, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, politician Andrew Yang, and a few leading AI researchers—have signed an open letter calling for a six-month pause on training AI systems more powerful than GPT-4. 

The letter immediately caused a furor as signatories walked back their positions, some notable signatories turned out to be fake, and many more AI researchers and experts vocally disagreed with the letter’s proposal and approach. 

The letter was penned by the Future of Life Institute, a nonprofit organization with the stated mission to “reduce global catastrophic and existential risk from powerful technologies.” It is also host to some of the biggest proponents of longtermism, a kind of secular religion boosted by many members of the Silicon Valley tech elite since it preaches seeking massive wealth to direct towards problems facing humans in the far future. One notable recent adherent to this idea is disgraced FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried. 

Specifically, the institute focuses on mitigating long-term "existential" risks to humanity such as superintelligent AI. Musk, who has expressed longtermist beliefs, donated $10 million to the institute in 2015.  

“Powerful AI systems should be developed only once we are confident that their effects will be positive and their risks will be manageable. Therefore, we call on all AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4,” the letter states. “AI labs and independent experts should use this pause to jointly develop and implement a set of shared safety protocols for advanced AI design and development that are rigorously audited and overseen by independent outside experts.”

“This does not mean a pause on AI development in general, merely a stepping back from the dangerous race to ever-larger unpredictable black-box models with emergent capabilities,” the letter clarifies, referring to the arms race between big tech companies like Microsoft and Google, who in the past year have released a number of new AI products. 

Other notable signatories include Stability AI CEO Emad Mostaque, author and historian Yuval Noah Harari, and Pinterest co-founder Evan Sharp. There are also a number of people who work for the companies participating in the AI arms race who have signed, including Google DeepMind and Microsoft. All signatories were confirmed to Motherboard by the Future of Life Institute to be “independently verified through direct communication.” No one from OpenAI, which develops and commercializes the GPT series of AI models, has signed the letter. 

Despite this verification process, the letter started out with a number of false signatories, including people impersonating OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Chinese president Xi Jinping, and Chief AI Scientist at Meta, Yann LeCun, before the institute cleaned the list up and paused the appearance of signatures on the letter as they verify each one. 

The letter has been scrutinized by many AI researchers and even its own signatories since it was published on Tuesday. Gary Marcus, a professor of psychology and neural science at New York University, who told Reuters “the letter isn’t perfect, but the spirit is right.” Similarly, Emad Mostaque, the CEO of Stability.AI, who has pitted his firm against OpenAI as a truly "open" AI company, tweeted, “So yeah I don't think a six month pause is the best idea or agree with everything but there are some interesting things in that letter.” 

AI experts criticize the letter as furthering the “AI hype” cycle, rather than listing or calling for concrete action on harms that exist today. Some argued that it promotes a longtermist perspective, which is a worldview that has been criticized as harmful and anti-democratic because it valorizes the uber-wealthy and allows for morally dubious actions under certain justifications.

Emily M. Bender, a Professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Washington and the co-author of the first paper the letter cites, tweeted that this open letter is “dripping with #Aihype” and that the letter misuses her research. The letter says, “AI systems with human-competitive intelligence can pose profound risks to society and humanity, as shown by extensive research,” but Bender counters that her research specifically points to current large language models and their use within oppressive systems—which is much more concrete and pressing than hypothetical future AI. 

“We wrote a whole paper in late 2020 (Stochastic Parrots, published in 2021) pointing out that this head-long rush to ever larger language models without considering risks was a bad thing. But the risks and harms have never been about ‘too powerful AI’,” she tweeted. “Instead: They're about concentration of power in the hands of people, about reproducing systems of oppression, about damage to the information ecosystem, and about damage to the natural ecosystem (through profligate use of energy resources).” 

“It's essentially misdirection: bringing everyone's attention to hypothetical powers and harms of LLMs and proposing a (very vague and ineffective) way of addressing them, instead of looking at the harms here and now and addressing those—for instance, requiring more transparency when it comes to the training data and capabilities of LLMs, or legislation regarding where and when they can be used,” Sasha Luccioni, a Research Scientist and Climate Lead at Hugging Face, told Motherboard.

Don't Sleep On That Tablet Anti-Disinformation Grand Opus

racket  |  Years ago, when I first began to have doubts about the Trump-Russia story, I struggled to come up with a word to articulate my suspicions.

If the story was wrong, and Trump wasn’t a Russian spy, there wasn’t a word for what was being perpetrated. This was a system-wide effort to re-frame reality itself, which was both too intellectually ambitious to fit in a word like “hoax,” but also probably not against any one law, either. New language would have to be invented just to define the wrongdoing, which not only meant whatever this was would likely go unpunished, but that it could be years before the public was ready to talk about it.

Around that same time, writer Jacob Siegel — a former army infantry and intelligence officer who edits Tablet’s afternoon digest, The Scroll — was beginning the job of putting key concepts on paper. As far back as 2019, he sketched out the core ideas for a sprawling, illuminating 13,000-word piece that just came out this week. Called “A Guide to Understanding the Hoax of the Century: Thirteen ways of looking at disinformation,” Siegel’s Tablet article is the enterprise effort at describing the whole anti-disinformation elephant I’ve been hoping for years someone in journalism would take on.

It will escape no one’s notice that Siegel’s lede recounts the Hamilton 68 story from the Twitter Files. Siegel says the internal dialogues of Twitter executives about the infamous Russia-tracking “dashboard” helped him frame the piece he’d been working on for so long. Which is great, I’m glad about that, but he goes far deeper into the topic than I have, and in a way that has a real chance to be accessible to all political audiences.

Siegel threads together all the disparate strands of a very complex story, in which the sheer quantity of themes is daunting: the roots in counter-terrorism strategy, Russiagate as a first great test case, the rise of a public-private “counter-disinformation complex” nurturing an “NGO Borg,” the importance of Trump and “domestic extremism” as organizing targets, the development of a new uniparty politics anointing itself “protector” of things like elections, amid many other things.

He concludes with an escalating string of anxiety-provoking propositions. One is that our first windows into this new censorship system, like Stanford’s Election Integrity Partnership, might also be our last, as AI and machine learning appear ready to step in to do the job at scale. The National Science Foundation just announced it was “building a set of use cases” to enable ChatGPT to “further automate” the propaganda mechanism, as Siegel puts it. The messy process people like me got to see, just barely, in the outlines of Twitter emails made public by a one-in-a-million lucky strike, may not appear in recorded human conversations going forward. “Future battles fought through AI technologies,” says Siegel, “will be harder to see.”

More unnerving is the portion near the end describing how seemingly smart people are fast constructing an ideology of mass surrender. Siegel recounts the horrible New York Times Magazine article (how did I forget it?) written by Yale law graduate Emily Bazelon just before the 2020 election, whose URL is titled “The Problem of Free Speech in an Age of Disinformation.” Shorter Bazelon could have been Fox Nazis Censorship Derp: the article the Times really ran was insanely long and ended with flourishes like, “It’s time to ask whether the American way of protecting free speech is actually keeping us free.”

Both the actors in the Twitter Files and the multitudinous papers produced by groups like the Aspen Institute and Harvard’s Shorenstein Center are perpetually concerned with re-thinking the “problem” of the First Amendment, which of course is not popularly thought of as a problem. It’s notable that the Anti-Disinformation machine, a clear sequel to the Military-Industrial Complex, doesn’t trumpet the virtues of the “free world” but rather the “rules-based international order,” within which (as Siegel points out) people like former Labor Secretary Robert Reich talk about digital deletion as “necessary to protect American democracy.” This idea of pruning fingers off democracy to save it is increasingly popular; we await the arrival of the Jerzy Kozinski character who’ll propound this political gardening metaphor to the smart set.

Biden Administration Leads Massive Speech Censorship Operation

foxnews  |  EXCLUSIVE: The Biden administration has led "the largest speech censorship operation in recent history" by working with social media companies to suppress and censor information later acknowledged as truthful," former Missouri attorney general Eric Schmitt will tell the House Weaponization Committee Thursday.

Schmitt, now a Republican senator from Missouri, is expected to testify alongside Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry and former Missouri deputy attorney general for special litigation, D. John Sauer.

LAWSUIT FILED AGAINST BIDEN, TOP OFFICIALS FOR 'COLLUDING' WITH BIG TECH TO CENSOR SPEECH ON HUNTER, COVID

The three witnesses will discuss the findings of their federal government censorship lawsuit, Louisiana and Missouri v. Biden et al—which they filed in May 2022 and which they describe as "the most important free speech lawsuit of this generation."

The testimony comes after Missouri and Louisiana filed a lawsuit against the Biden administration, alleging that President Biden and members of his team "colluded with social media giants Meta, Twitter, and YouTube to censor free speech in the name of combating so-called ‘disinformation’ and ‘misinformation.’"

The lawsuit alleges that coordination led to the suppression and censorship of truthful information "on a scale never before seen" using examples of the COVID lab-leak theory, information about COVID vaccinations, Hunter Biden’s laptop, and more.

The lawsuit is currently in discovery, and Thursday’s hearing is expected to feature witness testimony that will detail evidence collected to show the Biden administration has "coerced social media companies to censor disfavored speech."

"Discovery obtained by Missouri and Louisiana demonstrated that the Biden administration’s coordination with social media companies and collusion with non-governmental organizations to censor speech was far more pervasive and destructive than ever known," Schmitt will testify, according to prepared testimony obtained by Fox News Digital.

 

 

The FBI Found No Evidence Of January 6th Planning Or Coordination Outside Of Its Own

reuters  |  The FBI has found scant evidence that the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol was the result of an organized plot to overturn the presidential election result, according to four current and former law enforcement officials.

Though federal officials have arrested more than 570 alleged participants, the FBI at this point believes the violence was not centrally coordinated by far-right groups or prominent supporters of then-President Donald Trump, according to the sources, who have been either directly involved in or briefed regularly on the wide-ranging investigations.

Kash Patel calls on Tucker Carlson to release footage of undercover feds:

"Ray Epps was on FBI's most wanted list one day, and the next day he was off. There are only two ways that happens: you die, or you are an informant. Jill Sanborn, the head of the FBI counterintelligence… https://t.co/RALaXMKxX3 pic.twitter.com/8DJXX5JN1z

— kanekoa.substack.com (@KanekoaTheGreat) March 8, 2023

"Ninety to ninety-five percent of these are one-off cases," said a former senior law enforcement official with knowledge of the investigation. "Then you have five percent, maybe, of these militia groups that were more closely organized. But there was no grand scheme with Roger Stone and Alex Jones and all of these people to storm the Capitol and take hostages."

Stone, a veteran Republican operative and self-described "dirty trickster", and Jones, founder of a conspiracy-driven radio show and webcast, are both allies of Trump and had been involved in pro-Trump events in Washington on Jan. 5, the day before the riot.

FBI investigators did find that cells of protesters, including followers of the far-right Oath Keepers and Proud Boys groups, had aimed to break into the Capitol. But they found no evidence that the groups had serious plans about what to do if they made it inside, the sources said.

Prosecutors have filed conspiracy charges against 40 of those defendants, alleging that they engaged in some degree of planning before the attack.

They alleged that one Proud Boy leader recruited members and urged them to stockpile bulletproof vests and other military-style equipment in the weeks before the attack and on Jan. 6 sent members forward with a plan to split into groups and make multiple entries to the Capitol.

But so far prosecutors have steered clear of more serious, politically-loaded charges that the sources said had been initially discussed by prosecutors, such as seditious conspiracy or racketeering.

The FBI's assessment could prove relevant for a congressional investigation that also aims to determine how that day's events were organized and by whom.

Senior lawmakers have been briefed in detail on the results of the FBI's investigation so far and find them credible, a Democratic congressional source said.

The chaos on Jan. 6 erupted as the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives met to certify Joe Biden's victory in November's presidential election.

 

Why Didn't The House Select Committee Interview Officer Tarik Johnson?

Slate |  Carlson also made a big show of his “exclusive” interview with Tarik Johnson, a former Capitol officer who has actually been interviewed before by NPR. The House’s select committee on Jan. 6 did a fine job of connecting larger dots, drawing a straight line from the Stop the Steal rhetoric through to the insurrection. But though it interviewed Capitol police officers, it skipped an interview with Johnson, who was pictured that day wearing a MAGA hat. “The frontline officers and supervisors were not prepared at all,” Johnson said on the air. He told Carlson he asked leadership for direction after the Capitol was breached. “I got no response,” he said. (He said that he used the MAGA hat to avoid being assaulted by the crowds of rioters himself; the Capitol police have denied no one responded to Johnson.) Johnson offered seemingly sincere answers to Carlson’s leading and partisan questions, and gave Carlson’s audience a fair representation of the riot: “They focused on Donald Trump, not the failures of the Capitol police,” he said of the committee. “Some people there had planned on being violent. Some people may have turned violent after what they were going through. I think people wanted to support their president. Some of those people just wanted to support him, and some of those people didn’t commit violence, and some of those people didn’t plan on it.”

Academics Intentionally Making Up Shit Opportunistically Create Confusion

MIT  | Since 2014, viral images of Black people being killed at the hands of the police—Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Breonna Taylor, and many, many others—have convinced much of the public that the American criminal legal system is broken. In the summer of 2020, nationwide protests against police racism and violence in the wake of George Floyd’s murder were, according to some analysts, the largest social movement in the history of the United States.² Activists and academics have demanded defunding the police and reallocating the funds to substitutes or alternatives.³ And others have called for abolishing the police altogether.⁴

Here is the article in which Harvard profs call for greatest expansion of militarized police surveillance bureaucracy in Western history. Below I discuss the flagrant ethical and intellectual problems and how elite academia can be so dangerous. https://t.co/Cq1fFCdWR2

— Alec Karakatsanis (@equalityAlec) November 3, 2022

It has become common knowledge that the police do not solve serious crime, they focus far too much on petty offenses, and they are far too heavy-handed and brutal in their treatment of Americans—especially poor, Black people. This is the so-called paradox of under-protection and over-policing that has characterized American law enforcement since emancipation.⁵

The American criminal legal system is unjust and inefficient. But, as we argue in this essay, over-policing is not the problem. In fact, the American criminal legal system is characterized by an exceptional kind of under-policing, and a heavy reliance on long prison sentences, compared to other developed nations. In this country, roughly three people are incarcerated per police officer employed. The rest of the developed world strikes a diametrically opposite balance between these twin arms of the penal state, employing roughly three and a half times more police officers than the number of people they incarcerate. We argue that the United States has it backward. Justice and efficiency demand that we strike a balance between policing and incarceration more like that of the rest of the developed world. We call this the “First World Balance.”

We defend this idea in much more detail in a forthcoming book titled What’s Wrong with Mass Incarceration. This essay offers a preliminary sketch of some of the arguments in the book. In the spirit of conversation and debate, in this essay we err deliberately on the side of comprehensiveness rather than argumentative rigor. One of us is a social scientist, and the other is a philosopher and legal scholar. Our primary goal for this research project, and especially in this essay, is not to convince readers that we are correct—but rather to encourage a more explicit discussion of the empirical and normative bases of some pressing debates about the American criminal legal system. Even if our answers prove unsound, we hope that the combination of empirical social science and analytic moral and political philosophy we contribute can help illuminate what alternative answers to those questions might have to look like to be sound. In fact, because much of this essay (and the underlying book project) strikes a pessimistic tone, we would be quite happy to be wrong about much of what we argue here.

In the first part of this essay, we outline five comparative facts that contradict much of the prevailing way of thinking about what is distinctive about the American criminal legal system. In the second part, we draw out the normative implications of those facts and make the case for the First World Balance.

Israel News States The Obvious - Nobody Mad - Negroe Reporter Does The Same And Gets Fired For It

unz  |  Ye opened the floodgates. The Jews have a crisis of black people basically every day now.

Black journalist Isaiah Jackson, who works for CoinDesk, tweeted the following about the ongoing FTX debacle:

That was fast pic.twitter.com/tYMis0GORe

— Qualms (@Qualms19) November 12, 2022

It’s a pretty simple, obvious observation. Jews are 2% of the American population and 100% of the high-level FTX employees. This is similar to what we’ve seen Ye saying about organized Jewry engaging in high-level crime. It’s difficult to understand how this observation is “hateful” in and of itself, right?

Well, it might be difficult for you to understand, but it wasn’t difficult for the managers of CoinDesk, who immediately fired Jackson over the tweet.

In response to a tweet from Isaiah Jackson that made an anti-Semitic, hurtful statement, CoinDesk is immediately terminating his contract for his weekly Community Crypto show on CoinDesk TV. 🧵

— CoinDesk (@CoinDesk) November 11, 2022

It’s amazing how that happens every single time. It’s almost like Jews have a total lockdown on the entirety of American institutions and shut down anyone who even hints at criticism of them in order to make an example.

Jackson was just talking the facts – everyone in charge at FTX was Jewish. Literally everyone.

If Jews were just random people, then this would be a totally wild coincidence, and Jews wouldn’t care if anyone pointed it out. I didn’t have any Irish people come down on me when I pointed out that everyone I knew in high school who was known for fighting, charged with a crime, expelled from school, or sold drugs had an Irish last name. I told other people with Irish last names this fact and they said “lol. lmao.”

Yet for some reason, Jews freak out if you point out that Jews hold all of these coincidental positions of power, and are often associated with financial crimes or other clear misdeeds. If it didn’t reflect on Jews as a whole, they would not care if you pointed it out.

In the above example of people of Irish origin in Ohio being overrepresented among people committing misdeeds, this theoretically did reflect badly on people of Irish origin, though no one ever thought to get mad about it. Most people with Irish last names were not associated with misdeeds, so it was just a funny thing. It is not intuitive to get mad unless you yourself are personally implicated.

Jackson has completely refused to back down. He noted that all he is doing is recognizing a pattern.

Name Stealer Scientology One Helluva Drug: Bankman-Fried And Zelensky Not Going To Jail....,

He didn't make the mistakes his predecessor Bernie Madoff made. 

1. He took great care to buy off the regime in power, acting as their bagman for the Ukro-Khazarian money laundering scheme. 

Maxine Waters just blew @SBF_FTX a kiss. Safe to say that went well.😘 pic.twitter.com/C8I90fdmqW

— chochaymon (@ElliottFryback) December 8, 2021

2. He took great care not to rip off his Khazarian co-religionists, who wield outsize influence in America (to the point where an outsider might legitimately assume it is an almost entirely Zionist country). 

And, of course, he must have a substantial amount of blackmail information about Bidencorp's Ukrainian money laundering scheme. 

He's either going to be allowed to flee to a non-extraditable exile - or - commit suicide by a bullet to the back of the head.

astral-codexten |  Tyler Cowen linked Milky Eggs’ excellent overview of the FTX crash. I’m unqualified to comment on any of the financial or regulatory aspects. But it turns out there’s a psychopharmacology angle, which I am qualified to talk about, so let’s go.

1: Was SBF Using A Medication That Can Cause Overspending And Compulsive Gambling As A Side Effect?

 

Probably yes, and maybe it could have had some small effect, but probably not as much as the people discussing it on Twitter think.

Milky Eggs reports a claim by an employee that Sam was on “a patch for designer stimulants that mainlined them into his blood to give him a constant buzz at all times”. This could be a hyperbolic description of Emsam, a patch form of the antidepressant/antiparkinsonian agent selegiline. The detectives at the @AutismCapital Twitter account found a photo of SBF, zoomed in on a scrap of paper on his desk, and recognized it as an Emsam wrapper.

 What’s the blue-green bottle to the left of the red circle?

Here the detectives on r/NootropicsDepot recognized it as their company’s old brand of adrafinil7. Adrafinil is a prodrug of modafinil, an unusual stimulant-like drug. That is, your body metabolizes adrafinil and turns it into modafinil after you take it.

So was SBF effectively on modafinil? Seems likely - many traders are. I won’t lie - modafinil is a good stimulant, during medical residency some doctors (including me) would use it to stay alert through the night shift. It’s not any better than Adderall or anything, just a bit different and easier to get.

Does it affect attitudes to risk? Hopefully you can already predict my answer to that question: all dopaminergics affect attitude to risk in complicated ways we don’t really understand, but for most people these effects will be too small to notice. There’s one case report of modafinil causing pathological gambling, and various contrived studies where neuroscientists investigate how modafinil shifts some technical parameter in a risk curve; these kinds of studies often don’t replicate. I think you can really just stick to your prior of “all dopaminergics affect risk curves in ways we don’t understand, but it’s usually fine when your job doesn’t require perfectly-tuned risk awareness”.

Except - was he taking the selegiline and adrafinil at the same time?

Selegiline prevents the body from breaking down dopamine. Modafinil works by preventing cells from reabsorbing dopamine. If you can’t break it down, and you can’t reabsorb it, what happens? Does it just build up forever until it explodes and you die?

This is what happens with serotonin. If you take a drug that prevents serotonin breakdown (like a traditional MAOI) and a drug that prevents serotonin reuptake (like an SSRI) at the same time, you definitely die. Lots of doctors have noticed that the MAOI + stimulant situation is pretty similar and decided you shouldn’t take these at the same time either. So some people following the FTX situation have wondered whether this combo might have been very dangerous - either to Sam’s health or to his risk-management ability.

 

Why Did NBC News Suspend Miguel Almaguer For Accurately Reporting On Paul Pelosi?

dailymail  |  NBC News is under mounting pressure to explain its actions after retracting the controversial segment and this week suspending Almaguer, pending an internal inquiry.

It made the move despite a second report on the company-owned-and-operated NBC Bay Area station that repeats many of the same points in his segment.

National correspondent Almaguer quoted sources saying the husband of House Speaker Nancy did not immediately declare an emergency when he answered the door to police at the couple's San Francisco home following a 911 call.

NBC removed the footage from its website hours after airing on November 4, saying it 'did not meet' its reporting standards - and this week suspended the 45-year-old reporter pending an internal investigation.

et San Francisco's local NBC Bay Area news still has available online a report that also questions versions of the horrific incident, asking why Mr. Pelosi didn't flee the $8million house the moment officers arrived.

The suspension of Almaguer- who has been with NBC since 2009 – has now reignited conspiracy theories surrounding the early hours break-in and attack on October 28, allegedly carried out by Canadian national David DePape, 42.

Almaguer has not appeared on the network since the report, which directly contradicted claims made by prosecutors and the police.

One former senior NBC executive told Fox News that station 'needs to be more transparent with its viewers about this error… NBC owes it to its audience to be truthful and not cover this up'.

Unlike most affiliates, NBC Bay Area is directly owned and operated by the parent company. It is one of only around a dozen in the country to have such an arrangement while more than 200 others are independently owned.

In the now retracted report, Almaguer can be heard saying over footage of the four-bedroom Pelosi home: 'NBC News learning new details about the moments police arrived.

'Sources familiar with what unfolded in the Pelosi residence now revealing when officers responded to the high priority call they were seemingly unaware they had been called to the home of the Speaker of the House.

'After a knock and announce the front door was opened by Mr. Pelosi. The 82-year-old did not immediately declare an emergency or try to leave his home, but instead began walking several feet back into the foyer toward the assailant and away from police.'

The correspondent added: 'It's unclear if the 82-year-old was already injured or what his mental state was, say sources.

'According to court documents, when the officer asked what was going on 'defendant smiled and said that everything's good' but instantaneously a struggle ensued as police clearly saw David DePape strike Paul Pelosi in the head with a hammer.

'After tackling the suspect, officers rushed to Mr. Pelosi who was lying in a pool of blood.'

The footage then cut to Almaguer on screen saying: 'Law enforcement officials tell us the bottom line here is this is a terrifying situation.

'We still don't know exactly what unfolded between Mr. Pelosi and the suspect for the 30 minutes they were alone inside the house before police arrived. Officials who were investigating this matter would not go into further details about these new details.'